Direct Examination: Introduction

Direct Examination

A. As I understand the definition, intelligent
design is the proposition that there are some things, natural
phenomena in the world that could not have come to being by
natural means and that the design of these structures has a
certain complexity and certain features that implies that they
must have been produced by what is called an intelligent designer
by which is understood to mean possibly some kind of unknown
forces or a supernatural being.

A. Well, it has some similarities, and it has some
differences. Creation science is a movement that flowered mostly
in the 1960s and 1970s. And creation science was an attempt by
certain conservative Christian people with some science or
engineering degrees to attempt to explain Bible stories or to
find scientific evidence for Bible stories or explain them in
scientific terms, that is, to attempt to justify them on
scientific grounds.

Intelligent design doesn't have as its objective
to validate Bible stories or any particular religious or creation
stories, but what it shares with creation science, in part, is
the insistence that things were designed and could not have
evolved. And so over 90 percent of the corpus of intelligent
design work has to do with basically trying to undermine the
evidence for evolution and the concepts associated with evolution
and related sciences.

Q. And we're going to spend a good bit of time
talking about the undermining attempt, the undermining of the
evolutionary science.

As I understand it, the affirmative argument for
design, not the criticism of evolution, but the affirmative
argument for design is that it looks designed or it's so
complicated we can't imagine that it couldn't have been designed.
Is that your understanding?

A. That's my understanding, in an informal sense,
that that's what they mean.

Q. What's wrong with this appearance of design
analysis from a scientific standpoint?

A. Well, it's not particularly rigorous. Lots of
things look designed, but they may not necessarily be designed.
Intelligent design looks a lot like science in some respects, but
it's only superficial. It doesn't operate according to the
principles of science, so the resemblances are superficial.

And appearances can be deceiving. For all the
world, it looks like, you know, to us normal people, that the sun
goes around the Earth. And for most people, it wouldn't make a
difference whether the sun went around the Earth or it went
around the moon, as Sherlock Holmes famously said to Watson. But
when the renaissance scholars understood, found out that, in
fact, the sun does not go around the Earth but the Earth and the
planets go around the sun, it changed the way we look at the
whole natural world in a very important and fundamental way.

And so part of the process of science is to
discover things that will make a difference to our understanding
of the natural world and not simply to reinforce appearances that
are very difficult to test in an objective or testable sense.

Q. Let's begin to talk about the problems that you
have with how intelligent design represents science, and I want
to focus on the areas of science within your expertise. What is
wrong with the intelligent design arguments against
evolution?

A. Well, there are a number of systemic problems
with the arguments about intelligent design.

Q. I'm sorry, Professor Padian, have you prepared
an exhibit to help you explain this?

A. Yes. At your request, I've done some
demonstratives that I hope may be of use in illustrating some of
these things.

Slide 1: Summary of why "intelligent design" is a form of creationism.

Introduction

A. There are certain systemic problems with the
way that intelligent design represents the scientific findings of
the scientific community. And in a sense, it is really just
standard anti-evolutionist special creationism. I will explain
why it's special creationism in the course of things.

The ways that scientists have problems with
intelligent design literature is, first of all, that it provides
some misleading definitions of evolution. In doing so, it sets up
a straw man. It also distorts some commonplace scientific
concepts, and, as a result, it sows doubt in the minds of
students who would understandably be confused, as I am, by their
treatment of certain fairly standard ideas. When they --

A. Well, they begin -- if you want to begin with
definitions of evolution, they define micro and macroevolution in
different terms. Microevolution they're fine with. That's
evolution in populations. It's just genetic variation. And
creation scientists didn't have a problem with that stuff,
either.

But when we study evolution, we actually look at
it on several discrete levels. Microevolution is what happens in
populations at the gene level and among individuals in
populations within a species.

But then when populations diverge from each other
geographically and genetically to the point where they become
different species, different lineages that are not going to have
a mixed history anymore but separate histories and diverge
further and make more new species, we call this process
speciation, and it's a different level of consideration than
simply what happens in populations, because now you see we have
the situation where we're no longer exchanging genes with each
other in a population, we're actually looking at two separate or
more separate entities that will be that way historically for the
future.

Once we start looking at how these new lineages,
new species and new species that they give rise to, interact in
the environment, how they change further through time, how they
adapt more to changing environmental conditions, we're now at the
level that's called macroevolution. And the reason we call it
macroevolution is it's just on a bigger level. We're no longer
dealing with populations.

A. Well, like just groups of organisms. Individual
organisms within a species are different populations. You can
have a population in this valley, a population in that state,
whatever it happens to be.

The way that scientists regard this is much like
economists look at microeconomics and macroeconomics.
Microeconomics is how you run the corner grocery store, you know,
what the economic balance is in the small town's economy, how a
company works. But macroeconomics has more to do with things like
the Federal Reserve, the international balance of trade. The
common thing that -- the thread between this is, of course,
money. It's all about currency. It's cash at some level.

And with evolution, we've got genes that are very
similar because everything is hereditary. It's transmitted. And
the genetic transmission of this works one way within populations
when organisms can exchange genes, but when you get above the
species level, they're no longer exchanging genes. We're working
at different species disporting themselves through time. And then
you get the whole process of the evolution of new adaptations and
major groups of animals and plants.

And the intelligent design people define
macroevolution as a major change that has to happen to make a
major group, and they say that this is a completely different
process than what happens at the microevolutionary level. And
scientists just don't think so.

Q. And are some of the other concepts that they
don't quite represent accurately homology and cladistics and
classifications?

A. Yes, the basic principles of classification,
the principles also by which you can compare organisms in order
to say things in comparative biology are very problematic for
intelligent design creationists. They have a hard time explaining
these in the terms that scientists use. And so a lot of what they
do is to try to cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the basis of
doing these things as scientists understand them.

A. One of the problems with the ways that
intelligent design creationists present scientific evidence is
that they present only part of it. They present the part that
might suit their cause, but they really leave out an awful lot of
important research. And in so doing, they say that scientists
don't know this or they can't know this. And this creates the
sense of ridicule for students.

Now, you know, we'll be the first people to admit
that science doesn't know everything and can't know everything.
But on the other hand, we would like a fair and accurate
representation of what we do know.

I would also like to show in the course of
explaining some of these things today that most of the claims
that the ID proponents make are directly inherited from the
old-time scientific creationism claims in the evolution bashing
that they do. Many of the same arguments are used, the same kinds
of evidence are used.

And, finally, the conclusion that is raised is
that if you can mount some kind of alleged evidence against
evolution, which is most of what the ID proponents do, as the
scientific creationists did, then this is evidence for
intelligent design. In so doing, they set up this false dichotomy
or contrived dualism of religion and science that is disturbing
to scientists who have religious backgrounds, as well as to those
who don't have religious backgrounds because it isn't part of
science to do that.

Q. Now, you said that ID proponents
mischaracterize evolution as just a starting point. Matt, could
you put up the next slide.

A. Yes, calling macroevolution the origin of new
types, this is not a definition that scientists would recognize.
Macroevolution, as I mentioned, is looking at the patterns and
processes of organisms above the level of species.

So we're trying to figure out a lot of the major
patterns of evolutionary change, but the origin of new types,
again, that word "origins" comes in, and scientists just don't
talk about origins in that sort of cataclysmic sense.

The proponents of intelligent design, as you see
here embodied in these quotes from Of Pandas and People, claim
that it's a mistake to claim from macroevolution the status of
fact. And, again, this confuses for students what facts mean in
science.

In contrast, from Pandas, again from Page 99 to
100, they state, quote, that intelligent design means that
various forms of life begin abruptly through an intelligent
agency with their distinctive features already intact. And this
tells you two things, first of all, that everything was already
the way it was when things first appeared, so there's no
transitions, and that an intelligent agency did this.

Now, that's a perfectly fine idea, but it's not
scientific to claim this in advance of any kind of evidence that
could be adduced to the contrary.

Q. But in order for this to be true, you have to
show that evolution is false?

A. Yes, or at least you have to exclude the
possibility of considering it in advance, which is a
philosophical rather than an empirical consideration.

Q. If we could go to the next slide. You say that
there are other definitions that intelligent design proponents
confuse.

A. Yes. I would just like to clarify what we mean
when we talk about speciation, macroevolution, which really
differs from how it's treated in texts like Pandas. We call
speciation what happens when new lineages are formed. They
diverge from parent populations. That is, from old species new
species bud off, if you will.

And this can happen in many different ways. You
can have changes in behavior, in structure, in ecological
adaptation, in physiology, in geography, and all these things may
lead to the historical differentiation of these lineages. That's
how we get new species. It's been happening ever since life was
first running around on the planet.

Intelligent design proponents claim, for example,
in Pandas that when speciation occurs, it actually limits
variation, and so it's really unlikely that the kinds of changes
we see in populations can actually lead to speciation.

I find this statement surprising because there's
no evidence that I know of that when a new species forms, that
genetic variability is necessarily reduced. It doesn't seem to be
the case. Species that are closely related to each other, you
don't find one with a lot less genetic variability than another
that has ascribed to this process.

And so we regard speciation, in fact, as the raw
material for the big changes through time. It's like births in a
population are the starting point for populational change and
development and the way that new species are formed. Without new
species, we wouldn't get any kind of new developments in
evolution.

A. Well, the macroevolution -- then the speciation
becomes the raw material for macroevolution, because
macroevolution would be the study of what happens to those
species after they're formed and as they deploy themselves
through time, space, and ecology.

A. It says, Does speciation fit with the theory
that species were originally designed? If the intelligent design
explanation is true, there may be species on the face of the
earth that have undergone no substantial change since their
beginning. On the other hand, the idea of intelligent design does
not preclude the possibility that variation within species occurs
or that new species are formed from existing populations as
illustrated by the previous discussion of squirrels. The theory
of intelligent design does suggest that there are limits to the
amount of variation that natural selection and random change
mechanisms can produce.

A. Well, speciation is, for them, mostly unlikely
on the basis of the kind of genetic variation that occurs.
They're happy with genetic variation occurring within species.
That's perfectly okay with them. That doesn't lead to much of
anything. They say that speciation can occur, but it doesn't
involve new innovations and that some species have not changed
since their beginning. Now, we'll have to examine what we mean by
"some."

But they do state that the known natural
mechanisms are too limited to account for the important
biological change and the adaptive diversity that we see through
time.

Q. And if science's concept of speciation is, in
fact, accurate, then that would mean that there's no abrupt
appearance of organisms already intact?

A. Well, it certainly would mean that we are not
finding new complex adaptations appearing all at once in major
groups of organisms with no possibility of their evolution step
by step from other kinds of creatures out there, and that's a
point on which books like Pandas is quite adamant. They
consistently say this does not occur.

Q. And is this argument from Pandas and by
intelligent design proponents similar to the argument that
creation scientists made?

Q. Could you put up the next slide, please, Matt.
Could you tell us what this is, Professor Padian?

A. The slide is some text from a publication from
the Institute for Creation Research called Impact Number 43 by
Duane Gish. Duane Gish is vice president of the Institute for
Creation Research, a famous creation scientist speaker who has
been giving presentations against evolution for several decades
now.

And what I'd like to show by this quotation
included in the record is that the ideas of intelligent design
reflect exactly what special creationists, what scientific
creationists, so-called, were saying decades ago.

Here, for example, outlined in yellow on the top
paragraph, Duane Gish says that natural selection would be
powerless to generate increasing complexity and to originate
something new or novel and thus powerless to change one kind of
animal into another.

Now, by that is understood, at least, the basis of
speciation, and this is very close to what the Pandas text says,
and I think the idea really conveys the same message. In the
bottom paragraph, Mr. Gish notes that such a process could only
produce variance within an established kind and could never
produce new and novel structures.

Q. I want to start talking about some of the areas
of evolutionary biology and evolution that Pandas discusses and
get your understanding of whether they are accurate
representations of current scientific thought.

I've asked you to pick several examples out of
Pandas where you believe that they do not accurately represent
the science. And does the first one involve something called
cladistics?

A. Yes. I wanted to talk a bit to explain, if I
could, the basis for classification in science.